Monday, November 26, 2012

With the next few posts I want to discuss some aspects about God's creation of mankind and explore the significance of relationships and marriage from a creation-oriented perspective. In other words, I want to see what can be learned about relationships and marriage from the creation account and then apply. To start, I want to look at Adam's aloneness in Genesis 2:18.

Genesis 2:18: God says man's aloneness is not good, which means that He was not satisfied with that aspect of creation. Where it says "alone," we can think in terms of "separated," since that is the underlying Hebrew meaning (cf. Gen 21:28, Gen 30:40). But who was Adam separated from? How could Adam be separated from someone when no other human existed? Can a tree be alone if there is only one tree, or if we say, "That rock or that bird is alone," does our statement not assume that other rocks and birds exist? More to the point, if we say, "So-and-so seems awfully lonely," do we not imply that so-and-so has needs only met by the addition of another human soul? I think we do. But why is this? The answer to this question is answered in the creation account. God explains that we are designed by nature to be together with each other. When we are separated from one another, we are alone. This is not good, says God. It is not good to be alone. It is bad to be alone. It is unnatural to be alone. God created us to be together, not apart.

Furthermore, if Adam was labeled by God as separated before Eve was ever created, we must assume that God intended to create Eve from the beginning. When we think about aloneness as separation, this makes sense. Could God have created a self-sufficient human? Certainly. But we know that He did not, because after creating Adam, he was not satisfied. Adam was not self-sufficient because after he was created, the fact that he was alone was not good according to God. Adam's isolated existence was unnatural to creation, therefore the human component of creation at that point was not good, it was bad. But it must be noted that the badness of Adam's aloneness does not mean that Adam himself was bad. Rather, Adam's aloneness was the unsatisfactory component of creation. Adam himself was created perfect, but his aloneness left something to be desired. It was unfinished. God would complete Adam's aloneness in Eve. Since the aloneness of a perfect Adam resulted naturally from his creation, God therefore must have created Adam with Eve in mind. God intentionally created Adam in aloneness, and intended on resolving his aloneness from the beginning.So God created Adam knowing that he would be alone, and God had a perfect solution to Adam's aloneness in mind, which was Eve, the suitable counterpart to Adam, which I will discuss in my next post.